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Schrader's, a New Look for a So Cal Tradition

9/4/2015

There has been a long lapse in blog posts and I apologize for that. In May of 2012 I moved the business into a much larger space and things just exploded. It seems there was a lot of pent up demand, or something. I tripled my space under the roof and added two outside yards but it was full with new work within 30 days. Since then I have brought in a total of 5 outside contractors to help get the work out, including a body man. I think I am most happy to be able to keep paint and body work in house at this point as that is the one outside trade that has consistently been the bane of my existence since I have opened the business. I am not able to paint complete cars in house as the cit will not allow an more paint booths to be constructed but I am able to sublease a very nice downdraft booth not 500 yards away from me.

The other guys I have helping me are without exception seasoned industry veterans and I feel lucky to have them. I am learning more from them that I have at any time. I also have a new website about to go live and 2014 marks the 10th anniversary of Schraders Speed and Style.

Needless to say, there has been a lot going on over the last 8 months! I have not been totally on top of picture taking, and I also had a laptop crash last month, but here's a few pics of some of the jobs we have had through the shop and some that are in progress. It's a new year, and I've adjusted to the increased pace so you can look forward to more regular updates in the future.

This 1953 Chevrolet station wagon came to us for final assembly, wiring, and a whole bunch more. It is owned by the client with the 1958 Oldsmobile and is pretty nicely done, so far. The car was going along well and then the project stalled, for some reason. The shop doing the work did nothing for nearly two years, so the client decided to bring it to us. We put the whole car together then made it into a driver. It is now at the upholstery shop getting the interior done.

This 1965 Impala is owned by a client who is in the pawn shop business. He made a loan on the car 7 years ago and the owner made his interest payments all these years. A few months ago he came in and offered it to the pawn shop and they bought it! It's getting a pretty complete redo, here it is after a week of being torn down.

The car is now at an outside body shop getting painted. We expect to see it in a year, no joke. That's why I'm so excited to have a paint and body guy in house.

This 1956 Chrysler St Regis was a raelly nice original car from the collection of the client with the 1947 Lincoln. He drove it for a few years after buying it, and then it broke down for some reason. It was parked for 15 years, and then he decided to bring it to us!

The car is an original Hemi car, with air conditioning and power everything.

We did the brakes, the fuel system, got everything working again and shot some new paint on the roof and stripe. The car is now happily on the road again and a really, really nice driver!

The 1959 Mercedes left my old shop to go the upholstery shop in January 2012. We did not see the car again until November (!). Here it is all done, finally, and ready to go back to the owner. It came out great!

This 1965 Thunderbird is also owned by the client in the pawn business. It's a nice car that was restored some years back and never really sorted out.

We resealed the motor and gave it a major tune up, also fixed several leaks.

We also replaced all the vacuum lines under the dash, which was about 60 feet of hose in total. It all works now!

This Corvette is a full on race car, and a brand new build. It came in for some minor wiring work. This car is beyond badass.

We finished the 1958 Oldsmobile some months ago, it came out very nice. The owner decided to run Cadillac wire wheels with wide whites.

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Corvette Progress

9/4/2015

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I have been making some good progress on the Corvette. I found a complete take out for a 2002 Chevrolet Silverado, this one was a smaller 4.8 (294 cubic inches) with an NV3500 5 speed manual transmission. For this combination I decided to try and make it a more street friendly combination, something that will deliver full boost at 2000-2500 rpm. To that end, I am using a slightly smaller Magnum T72 turbo, it has a much smaller turbine side with a relatively large compressor side. It is also features ceramic ball bearings and water cooling. THe motor will have the same valve springs as the Studebaker but I am using a different camshaft this time, a factory cam from a ZR1 Corvette with the supercharged LS9. This cam will build cylinder pressure very quickly and should help spool time greatly. The only thing I am uncertain about is the transmission, not too many people have used them for this type of application.

The car is also using an 8.8 disc brake rear end out of a Ford Explorer and I have decided to run a Wilwood disc brake setup on the front with 12" rotors and six piston calipers. Since I had such an issue with tires on the Studebaker, I really did my homework this time. I want the period look but they must be able to handle high horsepower levels on the street and on the dyno. I found that Dunlop makes some bitchin' bias ply tires for vintage road racing which will handle very high horsepower and have the perfect look. Only problem is that the are $500 a tire (!). However, I managed to find a dealer who sells take offs for about .10 on the dollar! These are tires which have maybe one or two laps on them, or even tires which were mounted and never run. I bought extra rears....

Here's the car mocked up with the Dunlop Vintage race tires at ride height. Stance is perfect. I am not using the hardtop in these pictures, it just looked too goofy for me. I am building a custom removeable soft top that will be the dogs balls.

The motor is a 4.8 truck motor with a 1999 Camaro intake manifold. Everything fits under the hood nice, but I will have to hinge it from the rear.

I built the alternator bracket from .625 DOM and some .250 cold rolled strap. It's kind of artsy? What.

The giant air to air intercooler will hide our behind the stock grill, but we need to fix the valence first.

Just look at that stance. The tires are beyond perfect!

The car will have a single 3.5" exhaust, I have a Magnaflow race muffler on it but it might be too big for the car. We'll see.

I built the hotside using a stock truck manifold on the driver's side and a 2.5" crossover under the front of the pan to allow for unlimited ground clearance. This mates to a custom made log manifold on the passenger side. I made it from schedule 10 stainless, the material is very thick and supports the turbo perfectly.

The downpipe is 3.5" and there was plenty of room to route it.

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1954 Corvette

9/4/2015

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After I sold the Studebaker I immediately started looking for another project car for myself. I learned a lot from building the turbocharged LS in the Stude and I was eager to build another street car with the same power plant. After toying with a few different ideas abd looking at a few different cars I came across this 1954 Corvette. The car was part of a large collection and it had been purchased as a project. He bought it and immediately sent it off to a body shop for paint. The body shop took it apart, painted it Polo White and then went out of business. The car was locked up in the building for several months while the business went through bankruptcy and receivership, when the owner got the car back most of the parts were missing. You'd be surprised how often things like this happen, it seems like body shops are the worst offenders for stretching time lines, ruining budgets and generally having issues.

At any rate, the owner got the car back and glumly started looking to replace the missing parts. He spent a few months searching and collecting, and then woke up one morning and said, "Fuck this I'm done." I got a good deal on the car, not great but good. Since it is missing so many of the original parts it is a great candidate for a modified car (or "restomod", to use the parlance of our times). And by the way, the original parts for this car are simply outrageous. A radio runs north of $3000. The original air cleaners are about the same. It's just plain stupid.

My plan is to keep the car in the style of a late 1950's road race car, but with a fire breathing LS based turbo motor under the hood.

The car is pretty clean overall, what with new paint and all.

The whitewalls have go to go, but they are brand new so I should be able to get a few bucks for them. The red wheels got to go too!

I am missing the original seats ($5000 for a restored set anyone?) so I will run some period correct buckets, like reproduction Porsche RS Spyder seats or something like that.

Looks clean but the body shop did a quickie job. The whole lower valence was replaced incorrectly and will have to be redone for the grill to fit.

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Studebaker Redux

9/4/2015

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I sold the 1954 Studebaker to a long time hot rodder with a long history of owning some great cars. The car was an amazing learning experience and a great driver, I put somewhere between 6 and 7,000 miles on the completed car before it got sold. I drove it daily, it worked so well that my wife even enjoyed driving in it and she hates my junk!

I was able to do some further finish work on the car since you saw it last, and I did take it to the dyno for tuning, twice. The first time was a big disappointment, on the third full throttle run one of the bitchin' vintage style cheater slicks let go at 5000 rpm, about 149 miles an hour. It did significant damage to the quarter panel and trunk floor on the one side of the car. Although the manufacturer assured me his recaps were safe for high horsepower applications it runs out they are not, especially when subjected to the unusual loading of the dyno. In retrospect, it seems logical that the tire would only be as safe as the carcass that it was recapped on, in this case a 235/75/15 which has an S speed rating, or 112 miles an hour. We were spinning those poor recaps at 149 when we had our incident!

Later on I returned to the dyno and the car made 430-ish horsepower at 8 pounds of boost, but we were limited by the new tires to 4400 rpm. That was even pushing it at 130 miles an hour. The combination really came alive in a big way above 3500 and on the street I wasn't worried about the tires so much becuase they would just go up in smoke. In fact, the car pulled really hard in second gear and I saw 80 miles an hour in second gear more than a few times. Dirveability was simply amazing, the car would idle all day in traffic with no loading or overheating and I saw 23-25 miles to the gallon several times.

I added an 8 point cage which really made the car feel a lot more solid, and I installed all the glass before the car was sold. The new owner lives in Illinois and he came to Los Angeles in person to pick up the car, he and his freinds took turns driving it back across county with zero issues. He reported one stretch across Texas where they ran all day in sixth gear at 1700 rpm (which was 80-81) and saw a consistent 34 miles to the gallon! I will sure miss the car but I know for certain it's in great hands. I can't wait to see where they take the car from here.

This is what was left of the cheater slick. When it went, it was violent. I found the long strip of tread in a parking lot across the street from the dyno!

It folded up the virgin quarter panel real good. It actually rolled it up like a sardine can lid.

We wet sanded the original black paint with 2000 grit paper, then polished it with compound. That's original 1954 Studebaker lacquer. My wife took this shot the morning the car was picked up.

Here's the car during it's drive across the country, this is somewhere along the road in front of an old Conoco station. The car ran flawlessly.

Here is a video I shot on the dyno, this was the run right before the tire let go. If you look closely at the end of the pull you can see the tire start to do some freaky shit. There was a lot going on, but basically the tire is pretty heavy due to the recap, and it's trying to grow as it is spun hard. It can't grow because the car is strapped to the dyno so the rubber is trying to fling itself off the wheel. Watch the sidewall at the end, it is hating life!

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Monterey 2012

9/1/2015

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I like to take a summer vacation every year in August, for the past several years I have made the trip to Bonneville for Speedweek. Last year with the shop moving and the expansion of the business I was unable to take enough time off to make the 1500 mile round trip drive to the salt flats, so I decided to take a quickie trip up the coast to Laguna Seca for the Historics. This is an incredible event where the wealthy and the very wealthy bring their vintage racing cars to Laguna and flog them around one of the most famous road racing courses in the world. It's one thing to see a 1934 Alfa Romeo grand prix car, it's another thing entirely to watch three of them wailing down the front straight at full throttle. This is an event where you can watch old race cars worth literally millions of dollars get the crap beat out of them as they were designed!

The event itself is very unusual, it is very expensive to attend (a one day ticket cost me $90) and the pits are full of private coaches and private chefs, white linens, it's really incredible. Every year the event has a featured marque, this year was the Cobra. There were a staggering number of original Cobras there, maybe all of them as far as I know. There was way too much to photograph, here's some of my personal favorite highlights. Enjoy!

Simply beautiful.

Everything you see here is handmade. Back then when it was new, and today as well. Just look at that axle.

1934 Grand Prix technology, a double overhead cam straight 8 from Alfa Romeo.

The same car featured twin driveshafts as well. Just look at the detail.

This same Alfa had twin shaft driven superchargers. The sound alone was worth the $90 I paid to get in.

This is a mid 1950's Indy car powered by a Hilborn injected Chrysler Hemi.

Here's the Hemi!

There are also classes for later model race cars as well, here is a 1970 Dodge Challenger that was raced in the Trans Am series back then.

Not one but two Mercedes 300SL Gullwing race cars. At current market value this is about $4-5 million dollars worth of cars in this photo. They were both flogged around the track like they were just used cars.

One of the gullwing interiors.

I took this shot during the Cobra parade lap. This line went on for 20 minutes, non-stop Cobras! The gold one in front is a barn find car that was discovered a few years back and left largely as it was found.

I loved this Porsche 356, the color was perfect with the red interior.

Another Cobra, I like the BRG color especially with the magnesium Halibrands.

Not one but two late 1930's Talbot Lago Grand Prix cars.

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Schrader's, a New Look for a So Cal Tradition

Corvette Progress

1954 Corvette

Studebaker Redux

Monterey 2012

Mike Abssy

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